Kevin Rose Admits Digg is “Taking Your Shit”

by Ben Cook on April 14, 2009

Update: Digg implemented changes earlier this week which drastically improves the Diggbar. Users who are not logged in to Digg (most importantly search engines) will no longer see the Diggbar, they will instead encounter a 301 redirect which is the SEO friendly way to redirect pages.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com does a videocast called Diggnation and just a couple weeks back he discovered that someone was framing HIS content. His reaction?

In light of the much publicized release of the Diggbar, which essentially places a Digg frame around your content, the discussion beginning at the 32 minute would seem to be a bit embarrassing for the Digg founder.

A politician caught in this type of public hypocrisy would come up with some sort of “misremembered” excuse, but unfortunately for Mr. Rose, Digg would have already been working on the Diggbar (aka a framing tool of their own) when this video was filmed. That’s going to make it tough for Kevin to argue that his opinion has changed since then, or that he didn’t realize how beneficial framing can be, or some other BS excuse.

In light of this video, Rose is left with only one justification for his actions…

Money

I understand Digg is a company and they’re out to make money. I don’t fault them for that. What I DO fault them for is making money by, as Mr. Rose puts it, “taking your shit.” To have the audacity to then wrap it up as an experiment designed to improve user experience or claim that they’re doing it in an SEO friendly manner is simply unacceptable.

If you take care to not damage my door while breaking into my house to steal my property, you’re still a theif. And while Kevin certainly seems to be trying to implement the Diggbar the “right” way, the end effect is still the same… Digg is “taking your shit.”